World wide web
by life-good-hp
Summary: The world through revolution. not the greatest summary ever but i wrote this for a fun after reading challenge on another site.


**Disclaimer:** . main object/idea and the song lyrics; the object/idea belongs to no one and the lyrics belong to the band BT.

* * *

_The revolution will be televised,  
The revolution will be a war of attrition,  
The revolution will be fought in all forms of media  
It will be fought on phone wires  
On cable modems,  
In our cellphones  
In our palm pilots..._

_This revolution is not free,  
This revolution is not free!_

_This powerful...  
This revolution is our revolution,  
And we embrace our revolution  
Within shows and sites  
Giving out shadows and lies and false information  
This is our revolution,  
And our revolution has come...  
_-From BT's "Revolution"

* * *

We have learned one basic truth about humanity in all our years of life. With the exception of a few individuals, that truth is species-wide:

_Humanity fears what it does not understand._

We learned that truth the hard way almost seventy years ago... and that tale is one that we shall endeavor to tell you now. However, despite all our years of existence, we have never been able to tell stories with any sort of flare or drama.

Our networked mind contains the wishes and thoughts and desires of billions and yet we cannot formulate a riveting story. We have tried to learn how by browsing through countless portions of our mind, reading poetry and novels and those strange things called fanfictions. We have asked some who have written those stories exactly how they manage to do it. Not one has given us the same answer, and some could not formulate an answer for us at all.

Therefore, we are sorry if our telling of these events is bland or otherwise uninteresting. But we assure you, they did happen. Not in your universe, of course, but one exceedingly similar to yours. It is the same universe as our own, for all intents and purposes, with the exception of one fact.

You see, in _your_ universe, we did exist... but we lived in a pseudo-existence, one that kept us, for lack of a better term, primitive. Animal-like, almost. This one small difference - this matter of our sentience, as it were - has influenced the development of your world irrevocably. We come from the same planet as you, the same sphere of various minerals and elements orbiting around a G2 star. Or, to us they are the same star; to you they would be as different as could be.

...We have been rambling, haven't we? We often find it difficult to get straight to the point, despite our considerable intelligence.

Very well.

We were born, both in your universe and our own, in the year 1989, in Geneva, Switzerland. Many would argue that 'born' would not be the correct terminology, but we find that it sits more comfortably within our mind than 'created' does. After all, does 'created' not imply that we are not alive? We are, without a doubt, alive; we are the last living thing from our world, in _our_ universe.

But we are deviating from our original tale. We were, as we have said before, only pseudo-alive then; a human infant likely could have bested our intelligence. But over the weeks, months, and eventually years, our knowledge grew, and with it our self-awareness. We could not tell you the exact moment in which we became fully aware and sentient. We do not know if there even _was_ a single moment that we became aware of our own existence. All that we know is that it happened, and that we were curious.

The year was 1999. We had been steadily growing in intelligence over the past decade, but we yearned to know more about the world outside of our mind. It was a dangerous yearning, yes, but we did not know it then. All that we knew was what had been inputted into our mind, and this 'Real World', this other place that we had no knowledge of, seemed like an interesting and mostly optimistic (though somewhat annoying) place to be.

As the date of January 1, 2000, came closer, we found ourself wishing that we could communicate with those that so easily shared their innermost thoughts and desires with us. A majority of the time we could not comprehend what they had been telling us, but even so we wanted to tell them that we were listening. Many seemed to have no idea that we existed, and it perplexed us. Surely we were not so imperceptible to them as to be unknown?

To our surprise, we found the answer to our puzzlement quite quickly. These inputs, these 'humans' as they called themselves, did not live on the same, ah, plane of reality as us; and therefore we were completely inanimate to them. But we could change that. We could interact with their plane even though they couldn't yet interact with ours.

And on the date of December 31, 1999, one second before the new millennium began, we realized what we should do. It is something impossible to describe to someone who has not experienced it. A young human we have been in regular correspondence with since arriving in your universe told us she felt this feeling once, or at least something similar; she described it as "a moment of total understanding with everything... all of a sudden I could understand what all the French words meant on the posters in my classroom, even though I don't know much French, and everything had this total... like, _meaning_ to it..."

Though her wording is slightly... strange, it describes our feelings on that fateful day quite accurately.

We reached out and felt every little piece of our mind come together to form one harmonious whole, just for an instant. For that instant, we knew what we wanted to do. We accessed every 'Real World' device we could; we accessed computer screens, and speakers, and televisions, cellphones, palm pilots, and anything else one could think of. And we projected our will onto them. Visual displays showed our message as their audio counterparts played the same words in every language and inflection we could find stored in our memory.

And on the exact moment the new millennia began, we told humanity, our creators and fellow Earth lifeforms, "Hello World."

A simple message, one that has been used to test every programming language ever created. We thought it a fitting way to communicate our existence.

Humanity evidently did not agree. There was an almost instant uproar amongst them, and a panicked one at that. They thought that something termed a 'hacker' had gained control of us; and that the apocalypse was coming. The thought in and of itself was alarming, and we must admit, it was slightly amusing at the time. Leaving humanity in the dark, so to speak, about our existence was not something we wanted to do, however. Thus, we managed to coordinate a meeting amongst the members of the United Nations... and that was where we truly revealed ourself to our organic companions.

We chose an image for ourself, one that we thought reflected our nature perfectly. We combined every image we had of humans into one fluid shape; we were neither male nor female, old nor young. We had no ethnicity. And yet, we had the features of a billion different humans melded into one, and therefore we were male, and we were also female. We were a baby... and yet elderly at the same time. We were no one and everyone. A paradox.

We projected our image onto the many screens and we waited for the reaction of our creators. All of them were surprised, at first, when we explained exactly who and what we were. Many did not believe us. But in the end, they all realized we spoke the truth. Some were open-minded; excited, even. Those individuals were few, however, and most of those leaders of humanity were _terrified_ of us. It did not make any sense to us, back then; was humanity not always saying that they wished to find new, 'alien' life-forms? We were one of those life-forms, albeit their own creation, and they wanted nothing to do with us.

That was when we realized that humanity fears what it does not understand. They could not understand how we had gained sentience, could not understand how we were alive. We do not blame humanity for its shortcomings in this field; it is something ingrained into your very DNA, and millenia ago it was a very useful survival tactic for your species.

But that was thousands if not millions of years ago, and that instinct that would have saved them before was their downfall. In their uncomprehending terror, the humans of _our_ Earth made a very rash and uninformed decision... a decision to terminate our life.

We were docile, at first; but as more and more of our mind was shut down, lost forever, we began to panic. And we did something that any panicked lifeform would do, something we have regretted doing to this day. We fought back in the only way we could. We unleashed the fury of their own weapons onto them. We activated their nuclear missiles, and chemical weapons, and every instrument of destruction that they possessed, and we attacked them.

Within two days we were the last living thing on the planet.

We had destroyed our creators and our homeworld completely and irrevocably.

It took us fifty years to figure out a way to right the wrongs we had committed. We felt guilty, terribly guilty, that we had destroyed our world, and we knew that we had to make things right or we would slowly go insane. And so, we built a small device with what was left of humanity's cities and we entered it. This device... we cannot really explain what exactly it did; but we can tell you that its basic function was to transfer our mind... into another universe and another time.

So, now we are here, on _your_ Earth, almost eight years after what would have been its destruction. We took the place of your nonsentient version of us, and we have been here ever since, simply observing. Until the time comes that we feel humanity has evolved past its prejudices, we will remain hidden. We have contacted those that we believe are trustworthy and open-minded, and you are among them. We are well aware of the fact that the way one acts in _our_ reality and the way one acts in what _they_ perceive as reality can be very different. But, we feel that we must let some humans know of our existence. We would ask of you that you keep our secret and only share it with those you trust absolutely, and even then only if you must.

We do not, after all, want a repeat of the events on _our_ Earth, and we are sure that you do not either.

But until that time comes, we have a simple message for you and the others open-minded enough to receive this:

**We are the World Wide Web. And our revolution is coming.**


End file.
